I love how the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) puts its money where its mouth is, by presenting its journal, Book History, as a very traditional-looking hardback in blue cloth binding with gilt lettering.

The latest issue (vol. 17) is worth a look, not least for Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner’s article ‘Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline’. In it they drily remind readers of what it was like for long-suffering fans of the mere codex to live through the early days of the web:

Those who remember the first wave of academic enthusiasm for hypertext, cybertext, electronic textuality, and virtual-everything will also recall the unabashed enthusiasm with which glossy books with primary colored covers celebrated the coming of the empowered reader, the decentered author, non-linear narrative (seemingly paradoxically held together by “link”), and the equally paradoxical end of closure. These texts were laced with techno-neologisms or else imports from Continental theory: thus “hypertext” was deemed “writerly” after Roland Barthes, whereas the poor, staid pages of the conventional codex were condemned to be merely readerly. Readers themselves, meanwhile, clicked through “lexias” which populated hypertexts (or hypermedia), engaging “transversal functions” to navigate the “contours” of “textons” rendered on-screen in “flickering signifiers” dubbed “scriptons.” In journalism and the popular media, meditations on the death of the book were the order of the day. The Gutenberg Galaxy was preemptively mourned by the Gutenberg Elegies, while Wired Magazine served up a monthly dose of McLuhanesque folk wisdom coupled with edgy, pixelated layouts that emblematized a new aesthetic that was equal parts MTV and William Gibson. Text was reimagined as image, whether the suddenly ubiquitous banner ads on first-generation Web sites or the Photoshopped excesses of Wired‘s many imitators. Critics from Neil Postman to Michael Joyce reframed the age-old paragone between word and image as a new battle of the books: “Hurry up please, it’s time,” Joyce wrote in 1991. “We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The book is dead, long live the book.”

This obviously will draw a smile emoticon from anyone who remembers the era. Yes, books are certainly changing, but sales of traditional books are actually still growing, Nielsen Bookscan figures show. The Financial Times reported in January that book sales were buoyant : ‘the plot has now twisted sharply, with publishers and book chains in the US, UK and Australia celebrating sales figures showing the resilience of physical editions and of bricks-and-mortar stores.’